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Journal of Architectural Education

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Historical Consciousness
Reinhold Martin

Columbia University , USA

Published online: 05 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Reinhold Martin (2011) Historical Consciousness, Journal of Architectural Education, 64:2, 82-82, DOI: 10.1111/
j.1531-314X.2010.01130.x
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Op Arch
REINHOLD MARTIN
Columbia University

Historical Consciousness

Relationships between reflection and action change

over time and according to context. The term
agency describes such relationships. Insofar as it
represents the presumed authority of accumulated
historical activity, precedent allows us to
misrecognize history as possessing a transcendental
agency that supersedes the agency of individual or
collective actors.
Architects are normally thought to possess
agency in direct proportion to their capacity to
implement their ideas in practice, as expressed in
the misleading idea that architects build
buildings. Clearly, they do not build; they issue
instructions. However, the performative character of
this type of professional speech, whether enacted
verbally or graphically, readily allows it to be
construed as a form of direct action. Critical
historical analysis might assign further and
somewhat contradictory agency to different actors
at different stages, all of which combine to make a
particular architectural speech act possible.
Subsequently, the buildings themselves might also
be considered agents of change, independent of the
architects intentions. To imagine that the architect
proceeds linearly from reflection to action, and that
this process can or ought to be authorized by
precedent or by some other type of historical
knowledge, is to substitute an inexact metaphor for
a network of discursive actions and material
relations.
The past few decades of criticism and
pedagogy have recognized this. In fact, the modern
architects too-literal sense of agency has been
diminished to the point that many students seem
incapable of imagining themselves as historical
actors in any sense of the term. This despite the

recent and highly affecting calls to political change

that seemed briefly to have awakened a generation
whose historical imagination has been savagely
beaten into submission by a world system that is
based on a sort of permanent crisis masquerading
as stability.
Historical consciousness is an actually imagined
relationship with a predominant world system
understood to be subject to change. This system has
been variously designated as late capitalism,
Empire, or postmodernity. I say actually imagined
to suggest interpenetration between what has
traditionally been thought of as ideology (an
imagined agency) and the actual, material ground
of historical action. Particularly for the social strata
with access to advanced education, the imagination
has emerged as a real, material, disciplinary site, in
both senses of the term discipline. This
development, which has been widely observed, has
helped to requalify architects as symbolic
analysts, meaning that their role as actors in the
cultural networks operating the world system is
comparable to that of movie directors, advertising
professionals, or other knowledge workers. To
participate in such networks while failing to imagine
the possibility of anything like a structural
transformation of the system actively reproduces
that system. In contrast, a critical historical
consciousness can imagine such a transformation as
a real, historical possibility.
This is the minimum required of a properly
enlightened education. It also distinguishes
education from training, including the training of
the imagination to presuppose that no alternative to
the world system is possible. This type of training
occurs every day in mass or popular culture.

Journal of Architectural Education,

p. 82 2011 ACSA

Unfortunately, I fear that it also applies (and

probably has always applied) to the greater portion
of architectural education, whether it is historical,
theoretical, practical, or professional in character. I
will even risk extending this to include the recent
swing of the pedagogical pendulum toward a type
of earnest activism that cannot be faulted for its
idealism. Even there, the emphasis is generally on
entrepreneurship rather than on collective agency,
often in keeping with a latent or manifest
combination of the free-market ideology and
religiosity with which the American cultural
landscape is thoroughly saturated.
How then to teach a critical, secular, historical
consciousness? For this, architectures most
effective instruments have always been primarily
aesthetic. By aesthetic I mean something very far
from an art for arts sake helplessness or
indifference toward the world-historical processes to
which I have been alluding. Instead, I mean to
highlight architectures status as a kind of technical
instrument for educating the human mind and in
particular its faculties of discernment and
judgment. Buildings are not built in design studios,
lecture courses, or seminars. Historical
consciousness is. Like other cultural forms,
architecture helps to shape the contours of thought
by participating in the ongoing process of dividing
up the world such that some things are visible,
thinkable, and imaginable, while others are not. A
double consciousness, then, is required: one can
discern both the historical conditions under which
one is operating and the material processes that
organize the imagination such that this or that
possibility comes into view while others disappear.
That, too, is history.

Historical Consciousness

82